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April 2009. A paper I love prints its last issue.

July 2009. A man I love packs his things and walks away.

February 2010. I lay two house keys on the kitchen counter, and I leave the city I've called home for 19 years. For lack of anything better to do, I head to New Orleans.

March 2010. It's cold and the rain never seems to stop falling. I move back to Mobile.

March 2010. Oh, that's why I lost everything I loved. I understand now, I think to myself.

May 2010. Somewhere in West Virginia, I realize I was wrong.

January 2011. I gain a client.

April 10, 2011. I lay one house key on the counter, and I leave Mobile.

April 11, 2011. I get a job in a new state. I move to a new apartment. I lose a client.

April 27, 2011. An F-5 tornado destroys most of Tuscaloosa.

May 2011. I gain a few friends. I lose a few friends. I buy a few things. I write.

June 2011. My mama calls me. I'm late for work, stressed and harried as I walk Cowboy. I think she's calling to remind me to pay my speeding ticket. She tells me my grandpa is dead.

My world goes black.

"It's understandable," my ex says. "You've been through a lot of changes in the past two years."

A song on the radio makes me cry: You must think I'm strong to give me what I'm going through. Well forgive me, forgive me if I'm wrong, but this looks like more than I can do on my own...

Yeah, I think. Yeah.

I should write something profound. My grandfather deserves that much. But I find myself mute. Another song that plays on the same radio station comes to mind: I lift mine eyes unto the hills. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of Heaven and Earth...

Music — and Cowboy — are where I find comfort. I write, but there is no heart in my writing. I shoot, but there is no soul in my images.

I thought I would make a slideshow. Write down the flood of memories that my tears won't seem to wash away. But no. Not yet. Maybe never.

It gets easier, people say. I want to ask when, but instead I say nothing.

I have no words.

The grave of beloved Southern writer William Faulkner. Because I cannot write like the master, I will leave you with his words upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949:

"I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before...

...the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones..."

— Faulkner, 1949

A member of the Columbus Air Force Base Honor Guard carries the flag Friday morning during a morning reveille commemorating the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

A 3,000-degree Fahrenheit electric arc furnace prepares to receive a "charge" of scrap metal for conversion into steel.